Thinking

As you'll know if you have read the rest of my posts, I'm trying to save as much money as possible by commuting to work less and camping near the office is my main solution to this problem.

I've also mentioned in the past that the money saving is going well in terms of using a whole stack less fuel each week, but I do have to pay for the campsite each time I stay over. A night at the site costs me £7, but a return trip in the car costs about £14-£15... so I save around £7 each night I'm away.

I really want to become self sufficient for the camping part though, I do begrudge paying £7 for the use of a small patch of grass, a toilet and a shower. I want that whole £15 fuel saving to be all mine.

So, the thinking I have been doing is to try to provide the facilities I need without paying for them... What I have come up with is pretty simple idea for providing hot water for showering/washing.

The idea is that I could pick myself up an old roof-box from Freecycle and use it as storage (as intended) and also the base for a solar powered water heater. Roof box would be ideal for this as it spends all day sitting on the roof, outside, in the sun.

My idea has a few parts to it:

1. Insulated water storage tank - This is where the water will live, it could hold a few gallons of water and would be well insulated to keep in the heat. Something along the lines of high-density foam covered container, like you find in a domestic heating system.
2. An array of small metal capillary tubes to collect heat, perfect example of which is shown here - This chap has made a solar water heater by using the heat exchanger from the back of a fridge.
3. A regular solar panel to run a pump - This is the good bit! I would use a small pump (like you would get in a fish tank for example) and power it with a solar panel/battery combo. The best bit is that I would rig the pump to run only when the output of the solar panel was high, when the sun is shining I'll pump water from the insulated tank, through the heater and back to the tank. When the sun is not shining (at night!) all the water stays in the super-insulated tank.

The result of all this would hopefully be a tank of warm (or hot) water on demand to shower with, I'd run the pump for the shower directly from the vehicle battery.

So... what do you think then??